The Psychology of Beauty

he primitive art of all nations shows that it has taken the direction of symmetry about a vertical line. It might

it is applied, as the ornaments of baskets, pottery, and all rounded objects; and (2) all distortion, disintegration, degradation of pattern- motives, often so marked as all but to destroy their meaning, is in the direction of geometrical symmetry. The early art of all civilized nations shows the same characteristic. Now it might be said that, as there exists an instinctive tendency to imitate visual forms by motor impulses, the impulses suggested by the symmetrical form are in harmony with the s

the author's Studies in Symmetry,

ent contains a hidden symmetry, and that all the elements of that arrangement contribute to bring

pointing out from the centre fitted this formula if taken as "heavy," and pointing in, if taken as "light." Similarly, objects of intrinsic interest and objects suggesting depth in the third dimension were "heavy" in the same interpretation. All this, however, did not go beyond the proof that all pleasing space- arrangements can be described in terms of mechanical balance. But what was this mechanical balance? A metaphor explains nothing, and no one will maintain that the vis

because they call out the attention. And expenditure of effort is expenditure of attention; thus, if an object on the outskirts of the field of vision requires a wide sweep of the eye to take it in, it demands the expenditure of attention, and so is felt as "heavy." But what is "the expendi

f movement. But it must be said, first, that these are not felt in the body, but transferred as values of weight to points in the picture,-it is the amount and not t

asing arrangement makes the larger nearer the centre, and the smaller far from it. This is balanced because the spontaneous i

a picture, in whatever way it gains power to excite motor impulses, is felt as expressing that power in the flat pattern. A noble vista is understood and enjoyed as a vista, but it is COUNTED in the motor equation, our "bal

in the picture, the flat surface as a unity for the three dimensions. But it is only with the flat space, won, if you will, by Hildebrand's method, that the problem begins. Every point in the third dimension counts, as has been said, in the flat. The Fernbild is the beginning of b

ell known, all suggestions come to us with bewildering vividness. This is, then, just the state in which the contents of the picture can most vividly impress themselves. Form, then, as the means to content, by giving the conditions for suggestion, is Sourieau's account of it. In so far as form-in the sense of unity-g

ggestion